This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention disclosed below. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise explicitly indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
In a Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) deployment scenario, the number of network nodes is expected to be significantly larger than in a traditional network. A HetNet is a network comprising radio access nodes of varying sizes. Such nodes typically include “small” base stations serving “smaller” cells such as femto and micro cells and “large” base stations serving “larger”, macro cells. The smaller and larger cells overlap, and typically there are multiple smaller cells for every larger cell. In a HetNet scenario, a large number of small(er) network nodes (for example, an eNodeB) are deployed with high density in order to either improve the coverage or improve the capacity or both.
With the high density of deployment in a HetNet, certain fault events (such as power outage, backhaul failure, interference, thermal events, and the like) may affect a large number of nodes, resulting in flood of alarms. Thus, the increased number of nodes in a HetNet as compared to traditional macro cells will result in significant increase of management traffic, resulting in increased costs (capital expenditures, CAPEX, and operational expenditures, OPEX) to the network operator.